Word: films
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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...noted for the filmmakers which it has produced as for its critical reevalution of the world's cinematic output. With the exception of Andre Bazin, Whose explanation of the dynamics of the frame and the importance of cutting made him the most important theoretician in the history of film criticism, the people on Cahiers were all striving to make films, writing criticism only so long as they were unable to obtain backing for their projects. The first round of Cahiers critics became the first major group of filmmakers to start as critics became the first major group of filmmakers...
Claude Chabrol's "La Muette" is a work as precise and beautiful as any of his features. Chabrol deliberately modified his style to suit the limitations of a 16mm camera and a stock whose grain texture cannot hold the details that commercial 35mm film can. Thus the frames do not have the astounding depth and dominance of background objects which we have come to associate with recent Chabrol. At the same time, however, the frames retain a three dimensional quality and a precise interaction of parts that has been the basis of all of Chabrol's work. Unlike Godard...
...young boy who is in the center of the film is caught in a home of pervading ugliness and static emotional vacuity. Trapped in the background at a dinner table which serves only as a battleground for his parents (a grotesque self-parody these since they are played by Cahbrol himself and his beautiful actress wife Stephan Audran), he tries to escape first by minor acts of destruction and finally by placing plugs in his ears. After he does so, Chabrol repeates scenes we have witnessed earlier, only this time without sound. As expressed by a slightly closer camera...
...OTHER films, Jean Rouch's "Garedu Nord" is perhaps equally stunning and disturbing. Rouch who, along with Chris Marker, invented Cinema-verite (the difference between Maker and Rouch and the recent American copies is roughly that between the incredible Hitchcock of Vertigo and the bankrupt Polanski of Repulsion) is a master at forcing an audience to change their sympathies. Fantastically aware of the possibilities of a frame, Rouch can totally confuse a complacent viewer by having an actress turn her body about thirty degrees and in so doing undermine her earlier sympathetic position. In "Gare du Nord" these abrupt shifts...
...film is about a director making a film in which his lover, Lena, stars. There is the predicable confusion between what is real and what is being filmed, and finally film and real life merge when the leading lady jilts the no-longer interested director for the very interested leading...